Leonard and Wharton have made an important contribution to Stevens studies

and have exposed with great energy a critical area of hermeneutic inquiry which
demands further elaborationAmerican Literature
Leonard and Whartons critique of the differing philosophical stances assigned to
Stevens is carefully reasoned and impressively documented. The books potential
value is great, since the philosophical content of Stevens work remains important.

South Central Review

In this examination of Wallace Stevens poetry and the philosophical assumptions that
sustain and inform it, James Leonard and Christine Wharton confirm Stevens place
in modernist thought and art through a reinterpretation of his views on imagination
and reality. By attending to the varied meanings of the terms in Stevens poetry,
Leonard and Wharton reveal in the poetry a vision of the world as fluent mundo
where imagination and reality take place among multiple relational ties of image,
thought and perception resolved in the enigma and elegance of essential change.

J.S. Leonard is an assistant professor and the head of the English department at
The Citadel. Although The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of
Reality is the only book he has authored, Leonard has both edited and contributed
to a large volume of works. His writing has also been featured in newspapers and
scholarly journals as well as at literary conferences. Christine E. Wharton also
teaches at The Citadel, where she is an instructor in the philosophy department.

James S. Leonard and Christine. E. Wharton

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality

By pursuing the elusive terminology in Stevens work, the authors reevaluate many
of the most important studies of Stevens poetry, particularly the postmodernist
interpretations that find despair over the inability of poetic imagination to
effectively engage the reality of the external world present in Stevens later works.
They trace Stevens philosophic, aesthetic, and poetic ties to continental thinkers
Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Cassirer they show that for Stevens imagination
and reality offer less than a dilemma but rather an opportunity for poetry to arise
from a curious interpenetration so that there are fictions that are extensions of
reality and absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes.

The Fluent Mundo

PRAISE FOR THE FLUENT MUNDO

The University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
Georgia

The Fluent Mundo

Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality

James S. Leonard and

Christine. E. Wharton